Age: 93 years Hometown: South Hero, Vermont
Date of Birth: June 28, 1922 Date of Death: February, 6, 2016
Kenneth Tobias Robinson passed away peacefully in San Jose on February 6, 2016, surrounded by his family. Services were held in San Jose on February 6th and 9th, with the immediate family and many friends in attendance. Final interment with United Methodist and military services will follow at a later date in South Hero, Vermont.
Kenneth Tobias Robinson was born and raised in South Hero, Vermont where he worked on the family farm on Robinson Point, on the East Shore and attended school. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in December 1940, where he eventually served in the South Pacific during WWII. He served primarily at air bases in the New Guinea jungle, rising to the rank of Technical Sergeant. In 1945 he was rotated to the Philippines and then back to the U.S., where he was honorably discharged. He served in the Reserves until 1958. As with many in his generation, these war years had a deep impact on Ken, as he would relate to family and friends for the rest of his life.
Ken enrolled in the University of Vermont (UVM) in 1945 and received a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering in 1950 under the G.I. Bill. At UVM he met Mary Ethel Carpenter, of Charlotte, Vermont, who would become his wife. Ken and Mary were married at the United Methodist Church in the city center of Burlington, sixty years after his paternal grandparents had been married in the same church. Ken and Mary eventually had five children.
Following graduation from UVM, Ken worked for the Sears Company for a short time in Vermont, selling and installing furnaces. Then he struck out to try his hand at bigger vistas. Electronics were becoming an economic necessity in the 1950s, and he landed a job selling resistors for a small company in Ohio. Then he moved to the Carborundum Company, which proved to be the mainstay of his career. While with Carborundum Ken and his family went from Syracuse, New York, to Ligonier, Pennsylvania to Lewiston, New York in the early and mid-1960s, as Carborundum grew and re-organized itself.
In the mid-1970s, their children grown, Ken and Mary accepted an offer from Carborubum and moved to San Jose, almost at the start of "Silicon Valley." In San Jose Ken and Mary bought a home on Lockhaven Way, where they lived from 1976 until 2012, when they moved to Belmont Village.
Family was very important to Ken, and over the years he reached out to help his children and his extended family cope with life's ups and downs. His caring loyalty is well-known among those close to him.
His Methodist religion was also important to Ken, and he was an active church member throughout this life. In San Jose, for example, among other duties, Ken was the treasurer at the Good Samaritan United Methodist Church, while Mary helped run the church bookstore.
Ken always had a sense of curiosity about the world, and this led him to be a rather detailed student of history, as well as an active participant in the political dialogue of the day.
He also had a creative bent to fix and improve simple things around him. For example, when he and Mary moved from the Lockhaven Way home in 2012, they left for the new owners a working clothes dryer they had purchased from Sears in the late 1950s and which Ken had maintained for over five decades.
Kenneth Tobias Robinson was a good and decent American. He always did his job to his fullest. He loved his family and his church. Not one to complain, he carried a wonderful sense of humor throughout his life.
He was clearly a member of what has been called America's "greatest generation."
Ken was predeceased by his parents, Gladys and Edward, his siblings Edward Jr., Esther, Joan and David, and his granddaughter, Chelsea. He is survived by his wife of sixty-nine years, Mary Ethyl (Carpenter) Robinson of San Jose, his sons and daughters, Eric of Sitka, Alaska, Susan (Kreuzer) of Merritt Island, Florida, Lloyd of Fredericksburg, Virginia, Sarah of Winooski, Vermont and Calvin of Sitka, Alaska. He is also survived by eight grand-children and eight great grand-children.